The Yo Smite Blog

Well, I can actually scratch one of the names off my longer-than-fuck list of “places in my own goddamn backyard that I’ve never been to before in my 4 decade long miserable boring fucking life” (long lists deserve long names, so eat me). With a motley crew of individuals, representing the various other fringe elements of society (hereafter we shall refer to them by their code names, DaniGirl and LaLa), I finally got to visit Yosemite, or “yo smite” as we used to call it when we were young and drunk and stupid. And I was instantly branded as the record keeper of our little sojourn. So away we go…

Despite the fact that it took approximately 87 hours of driving thru crazy-assed mountain roads after leaving Chukchansi casino to reach our first destination, Yosemite didn’t seem particularly BIG upon first impression. Probably because of the reverential way in which most people speak of Yosemite, my mental image had always been of a huge wilderness where, if you were standing at dead center of the park, then the nearest human help if you, say, “accidentally” shot your ditzy-assed traveling companions in a fit of rage was like 3 days away by fucking helicopter or something. But in fact, you can see the whole damn thing from our first stop, Glacier Point; El Capitan, Half-Dome, about a thousand (give or take) waterfalls, the Ahwanee Hotel, etc. Of course, I’m probably exaggerating just a tad, and you can’t see the areas where the trails will take you, but basically you get a pretty good overview. I shot something like thirty-seven million pictures (again, give or take) from here because I figured my Jurassic-era camera would definitely fuck up half of them like the little 4 megapixel bitch it is, but actually I must commend my camera; some of the shit I took is actually pretty cool. I must have shot more of Half-Dome than anything else in the park, from a million different stops and at different times of day. I also got several of each waterfall, some because they were flowing so lightly that they weren’t all that easy to see. Here, I went and left my brains in the fucking toilet again: just like at KISS, I left my goddamned binoculars in the car. And even more annoying, my old man has a binoculars/digital camera combo that would have been spectacular, but I had to go and fucking forget it, too. Some old man and his wife offered to take our picture here, but his wife tried the first two shots and managed to cut DaniGirl out of the scene altogether. Finally, he stepped in and got the job done right, like men are always having to do for women…

I’m really not too precise on our trips chronological order (I also supplied the “party favors”, and they were truly high-quality, know what I mean?), but I believe our next stop was Tunnel View. I’m always thinking “Isn’t it Tunnel Vision? It sounds so much cooler!” But it’s Tunnel View; I even Googled it to be certain, and there’s a ton of pictures on the Internet taken at a time of year when the waterfall was REALLY raging, which just makes me all the more jealous. Someday, I’ll go back when it’s SPRING, and check these waterfalls out again, because I really feel like I missed out in that aspect. It’s still an excellent view and an excellent picture (the one I took), however, and is now in fact the desktop I use for my computer. Cool.

Where the fuck did we go after that…I’ll never figure that, so let’s just go to the first waterfall since that was probably the right answer anyway. Here we came to our first obstacle; you have to climb over thirty or forty yards worth of rocks, ranging in size from “slingshot ammo” to “Cadillac Escalade”, to reach the small pool at the base of the waterfall. And of course, these are rocks polished by running water until they are all slick and slippery even when dry as they were now. But after safely traversing this field of rock, somehow without splattering my brains all over a chunk of granite or breaking my camera, we finally reached the base where several other people already gallivanted about like…well, tourists. Giddy tourists who had done something brave and tough and cool: they had conquered that field of fucking rock, yeah (hey, not everybody can climb El Cap, and we know our limitations)!! Some people were stupid enough to just let their kids keep on climbing; I saw at least one kid who seemed to think it was a magical beanstalk with money or chocolate or naked chicks or something at top. He definitely seemed determined, anyway, and was probably 20 or 30 feet higher than I was; his dad just said “Naaaahhhh, he’s all right” when someone mentioned to him that he might want to tell his kid to stop climbing before he reached outer fucking space. I just love parents like that. Hell, my mom won’t let me use anything sharper than a fucking butter knife to this day for fear I’ll sever a limb, but this fucking kid just climbs to Mars and his folks could give a shit. Fan-fucking-tastic. He’s probably a future David Blaine, and while we all know what a dick David Blaine is he has got to nail some really top-shelf Hollywood nookie in his time. And gotten rich, too.

Sometime during our adventures—several times, actually—we parked and just went into a store. It’s kind of surprising, to me anyway, that a place that people fight so hard to protect has got so many stores in it. I would have figured they just had one big village somewhere in the middle of the valley, but stores seemed to be around every fucking tree selling shirts and stuffed animals and coffee mugs and souvenir medallion makers (you put a penny + fifty cents into a machine, and it grinds the penny into a new oval-shaped design; I got four of the fucking things, thanks to DaniGirl’s considerable largesse with her pennies), calendars, etc. Also, lots of camping equipment, and the shit you’d find in any convenience store: bottled water, corndogs, candy bars, beer, ice, extra large condoms (for when Harlem goes camping, I guess?), blah blah blah. All of these places were crowded as shit, and this was just a Monday, too. The animals are just about as tame as possible without becoming completely domesticated: I don’t know that they’d actually come up to you, eat out of your hand or anything (which, despite a total lack of signs saying so, had to have been against the rules anyway, I would think), but deer didn’t mind being only 3 or 5 feet away from people at all. A mother and her fawn walked thru the parking lot not long after we got to one of these places; the fawn probably only came up to a little higher than my kneecaps. Just sashayed right on thru. And squirrels would practically fucking mug people sitting at tables and eating. I saw one dude about have a heart attack after a feisty bastard jumped onto his table right next to him.

Aside from the deer and squirrels, however, wildlife (aside from our group, anyway) was basically non-existent. That’s another thing you kind of expect, but don’t really know for sure: that you’ll see fucking mobs of black bears roaming the parking lots and pissing on car tires like goddamned dogs or something, or lots and lots of hawks and/or eagles. My own buddies told me about a bear that fucked up their camp site, ate the butter or some shit that was in their ice chest, during the night while they were in their tents. Didn’t see shit--NADA. Supposedly, on the way out, one was out wandering about in the street or a meadow, and there was about a zillion cars slowing down or just stopping in the middle of the road try to see it and get a pic. I never did see it, don’t know about DaniGirl, but I certainly fucking didn’t, while LaLa says she did. And not one goddamn bird that I wouldn’t have seen in the valley, either. But again, although I’m sure everybody thinks I sound highly pissed right now (come on, when fucking DON’T I?), I can’t say that ruined the trip. YOU HEAR ME, LALA??? IT WAS FUN!!! THANKS!!! I WOULD GO BACK AND ALL THAT SHIT! LIKE, CAMP OUT A NIGHT OR TWO EVEN???

We didn’t really see much in terms of meadows. We stopped at a church that was, in real-world terms, dull as shit. But IT WAS AN OLD YOSEMITE CHURCH! So, in that odd way, it took on some interest and significance. Plus, there was a fair-sized meadow next to it, so it was like double score!!! We HAVE to stop!! So we got out and walked up to the church, only to discover that God does indeed take vacations too, apparently, because it was locked up tight. Afterward we frolicked in a very hippy-like manner in the meadow for a short while. I figured that just walking into the goddamned meadow would be enough to guarantee I’d catch Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or ebola or some other fucked-up flea or tick-borne disease, but DaniGirl and LaLa just romped around all over the fucking place like lesbian Sumo wrestlers or something. I eventually got down low enough to take a few pictures myself and to have my picture taken with the rest of my…party.

LaLa’s insistence that we clamber to the base of the last waterfall, and last stop of the day, was enough of a pain in the ass to begin with, but then she had to climb to the top of a big fucking rock to grab a hit or two from my pipe first, and coming back down from that bastard I jammed my right little toe up good. Like she gave a shit: “I’m going!!! I’m going!!!” It was like Spock and pon farr; she had to see that little puddle of water at the bottom of the waterfall, or else she would DIE. I went most of the way, but eventually figured “Fuck this, I’ve got 200 fucking pictures of this park and been to the base of one waterfall already and my fucking toe hurts like FUCK, so I’m kicking it here and then heading back!” Which is what I did. Me and my hobbled, fucked, blistered foot limped back to the car. As it would turn out, the little toe improved quickly, while the blisters under my big toes did not. I lived anyway.

There was actually some tour or something, I thought LaLa called it the Dragon or something of the sort, that rode around the park in these big, open air coaches that were pulled behind a bus or truck or something. It looked like it would have been pretty cool, actually, but apparently it was not a free option. They had other coaches, trams, shuttles, whatever the fuck you want to call them, that also went thru the park and were free, but they were just busses, maybe not as dirty as your average municipal bus but nothing particularly nice, either. I was just as glad we drove, so we could take our ice chests and burn a bowl occasionally and all that shit.

What you then discover is that, just as it takes fucking forever to get into Yosemite, it takes fucking forever to get OUT, too. In fact, out is worse; it’s just sequoias for an hour or more, which is rather dull and repetitive, especially when you’re ready for something more to eat than the chocolate chip cookies and peanuts you took up with you. So we scrounged at the Chukchansi casino mega-buffet. It looked like they probably had more to choose from if you were there earlier (we got there about fucking NINE’O’CLOCK!), but it was still pretty decent, and better than shitty-as-hell Home Town Buffet in Visalia. There was an Oriental counter, an Italian counter, a Spanish counter, and a counter with generally American-style shit: biscuits’n’gravy, fried chicken, roast beef, etc. And, of course, there was a desert island, which I skipped: I wanted to check out the casino a little after getting a little nourishment in my gut. The casino was, actually, pretty dull; ten, eleven’o’clock on a Monday night was slow and relatively quiet. It blew me away to actually see people SMOKING INDOORS again, not that I missed the annoying fucking people who actually engage in the activity. It was just weird to smell the shit and see some fat-assed hick spread out across two seats in front of the slots with his ashtray and cigs, putting money into the machines like it was a job or something. Anyway, we all spent something like $10 or $20 on the slots, and decided to call it a night.

So, to wrap up, I got home eventually, about 1 in the morning or something around that. In true Steve luck, the first store I stopped at didn’t have any fucking coffee; I was about halfway home before I finally found a place that still had some.

As a lesson to all guys out there, I offer up this: NEVER TAKE A FUCKING TRIP WITH TWO WOMEN IF YOU’RE THE ONLY GUY GOING!!! You will be poked, prodded, cajoled, examined, and generally treated like a subject…plus you’ll never win an argument, not fucking one. Save yourselves and your sanity…TAKE AN EXTRA GUY ALONG!!!

And it was nice to meet you as well, DaniGirl, and see LaLa for the first time since she made my stint in Geography One a living hell all those years ago. Til the next adventure…

Death By Cholesterol (which is not a bad name for a band, when you think about it...)

Someone in rock’n’roll should write a song about cholesterol. It sounds boring as fuck—trust me, I realize that. But why not? It’s killing people all over the country, all over the world even (although nowhere nearly as much as the United States, home of such fabulous delicacies as the “Cow On A Bun” cheeseburger at Royal Burger or whatever). Rockers LOVE to write about shit that kills people—war, disease, all that good stuff, but dope and/or alcohol seems to be the real favorite. Everybody from the Velvet Underground to Neil Young has written songs about heroin, or songs about legends like Bon Scott and Hank Williams that drank themselves to death—actually, I’m not even sure you ARE a legend in rock or country music until your death certificate says “choked on vomit due to extreme alcohol intoxication” on it, seeing as how it also killed, or played a part in the deaths of, Jimi and Janis and Zep’s Bonzo and the Dead’s Pigpen and the Lizard King and Christ knows who all else. Metallica covered coke addiction with “Master of Puppets,” as did Sabbath with “Snowblind”. The Stones have written brilliantly about every drug known in this quadrant of the universe I think, including some that are probably only known to Keith Richards (Keith’s smart, he knows that if nobody else knows about it then he gets it all to himself). So why NOT cholesterol? I suppose the words “chicken leg” don’t look nearly as cool in a song title as the word “needle” does, as in Young’s bleak classic “The Needle and the Damage Done” but still…

It just made me ponder, that’s all…Long story short, I finally get an EEG tomorrow, which my dildo slope doctor has been telling me for MONTHS hadn’t been approved by the county yet and promising he’d check into what was taking so long. However, when I saw him last Monday he told me that it had been approved since SEPTEMBER—in fact, the little Khmer Rouge prick actually asked me why it hadn’t been done yet. It about took all the restraint I could muster to NOT whip out my pocket knife and start practicing my tracheotomy skills on the asshole. If the EEG comes back negative, which it PROBABLY will—the first AND last one I had, about 8 years ago, was—then I get to choose whether or not I want to try stopping my Tegretol. I say “choose” because, clean EEG or not, there’s always a chance that I could have seizures anyway. If I chose not to risk it, I could just keep on taking the fucking things for the rest of my life, it’s not like they’re going to kill me. But they DO have side effects (like inability to concentrate and falling asleep in the middle of taking a piss and other fun things), and I would hope that they would disappear after a while off the shit. Not to mention 4 less pills a day I have to swallow.

But it still leaves me with 4 OTHER prescriptions to fill every month, and EVERY FUCKING ONE OF THEM is related to diet, really. And that shit sucks. I could get off of one or maybe two of them pretty easily, I suspect: there’s Altace (I ain’t even sure what the fuck it does, all I know is they call it an “ace inhibitor” or “a.c.e. inhibitor” or what the fuck ever), then there’s Adalat, the only one that they said is DIRECTLY meant to lower blood pressure, and it wasn’t too high anyway—ONE number was 5 too high or something, meaning like 130 over 90 was acceptable, if borderline, but I was 135 over 90 or some bullshit (taking all these pills, it’s consistently like 120 over 80 or 85 now, excellent according to Dr. Pol Pot). There’s Lipitor for cholesterol, and starting last week I’ve got Niaspan as well, which is to help block digestion or absorption of fat from your food (or something). And that last one SUCKS, too: the pharmacists I got it from said that a common side effect was a prickly, tingly feeling on the skin and that was all he mentioned. But when my mom learned that I was taking it she said, “Oh, I take that too, my pharmacists said that it could cause prickly skin and flushing (or hot flashes) and if you took an aspirin with it (you’re supposed to take this prescription at bedtime) and ate a low- or no-fat snack with it that would help. And don’t eat anything fatty for a couple of hours before bed.” The first couple of nights I didn’t really bother listening to her, because the pharmacist I talked to is actually a pretty good guy, seems to know his shit and whatnot, and since he didn’t mention either of those things I wasn’t too concerned about it. However, on the second night I woke up about 90 minutes after taking it and felt like I was on fucking fire, as if you could light a cigarette off my bare skin the same way you would off a car cigarette lighter. And just as bad was the prickly, tingly shit—it felt like somebody had taken the world’s most powerful alarm clock, one of those old-timey wind-up bastards with the bells on top you see in TOM AND JERRY cartoons, and shoved it up my ass just as it was going off. Fortunately, it didn’t last too long, maybe 30 minutes, before it died down enough to let me get back to sleep. I’ve been following her pharmacists advice every night since and had no repeat problems, however.

I suspect I could alter the diet a bit, could DEFINITELY stand to exercise (a work-out partner, or personal trainer, would help me IMMENSELY with this one), but I don’t know what else I can do. The unavoidable fact of the matter is, I have a shitty, bordering on unfit-for-human-life kind of diet, and I CAN’T REALLY HELP IT. I HATE 99% of what’s healthy for you, food-wise, and it’s not like I CHOSE to be this way. I would absolutely LOVE to be able to call myself a vegetarian, which surprises me to no end since I find most vegetarians to be unbearable, self-righteous, communist-sympathizing, Satan worshipping pricks (and those are their good qualities, too—don’t get me started on what really makes them insufferable assholes). But basically ALL vegetables are totally unpalatable to me. I like corn fine, particularly on the cob, with a thick juicy steak and garlic bread and all that stuff. But every other vegetable that springs to mind, to me, tastes like dog shit rolled in cat shit and garnished with bird shit. Lettuce, onions, etc…yecch. And the weirdest thing is, everybody tells me that I couldn’t get enough of that shit when I was a baby. My folks tell me that I used to inhale peas like Corey Haim used to inhale OxyContin, to cite just one example. No more; if it ain’t meat and potatoes then I ain’t interested.

And people think you’re just a big, spoiled baby for it, too. You hear shit like, “Boy, I wish I could live on pizza and cheeseburgers and Taco Bell like you do.” But trust me, it ain’t that great—no matter how great something is or how delicious it may be, if you eat it often enough you will get bored sick with it. If you ate lobster for dinner every day starting on Monday, by Friday you’d rather see every fucking lobster on Earth wiped out then eat it again that night.

But who knows? Like I said, I think I could change my diet enough to, at the very least, get off the Niaspan fairly easily. And I guess I’ll just have to work on the other prescriptions after that. If I could get off even 30 pounds (doc would rather I lost 50 to 70) I could probably get off the Adalat, too.

All I can do is try, I suppose…